Bible Encyclopedias
Susan Brownell Anthony

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

Search for…

Enter query below:

or

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z

Prev Entry
Susa, Tunisia

Next Entry
Susanna Blamire

Resource Toolbox

Print Article

SUSAN BROWNELL ANTHONY (1820-1906), American reformer, was born at Adams, Massachusetts, on the 15th of February 1820, the daughter of Quakers. Soon after her birth, her family moved to the state of New York, and after 1845 she lived in Rochester. She received her early education in a school maintained by her father for his own and neighbours' children, and from the time she was seventeen until she was thirty-two she taught in various schools. In the decade preceding the outbreak of the Civil War she took a prominent part in the anti-slavery and temperance movements in New York, organizing in 1852 the first woman's state temperance society in America, and in 1856 becoming the agent for New York state of the American Anti-slavery Society. After 1854 she devoted herself almost exclusively to the agitation for woman's rights, and became recognized as one of the ablest and most zealous advocates, both as a public speaker and as a writer, of the complete legal equality of the two sexes. From 1868 to 1870 she was the proprietor of a weekly paper, The Revolution, published in New York, edited by Mrs Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and having for its motto, "The true republic - men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less." She was vicepresident-at-large of the National Woman's Suffrage Association from the date of its organization in 1869 until 1892, when she became president. For casting a vote in the presidential election of 1872, as, she asserted, the Fourteenth Amendment to the Federal Constitution entitled her to do, she was arrested and fined $loo, but she never paid the fine. In collaboration with Mrs Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mrs Matilda Joslyn Gage, and Mrs Ida Husted Harper, she published The History of Woman Suffrage (4 vols., New York, 1884-1887). She died at Rochester, New York, on the 13th of March 1906.

See Mrs Ida Husted Harper's Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (3 vols., Indianapolis, 1898-1908).